Pub Date : 2021-10-18DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1984610
Benjamin Hennchen
Abstract The current systems of food production and consumption are not sustainable due to a high level of resource inefficiency, environmental pollution and unhealthy eating habits. This paper focuses on the issues of wasting food and overeating, which have received increasing attention in other recent studies on the food service sector. A majority of those studies look at the choices made by customers regarding portion size and the effect those choices have on consumed food and leftovers. Against this background, the current exploratory study addresses the professionals’ perspective on why and how they serve specific food amounts to customers. To answer this question, the study draws on qualitative research and an analytical framework derived from theories of practice. The results show that defining and providing adequacy depends on professionals’ prior knowledge, the gastronomic concept, reflections on health and pricing issues, prevailing kitchen infrastructures, work rhythms, and esthetics in food presentation. An explanatory model is further developed in order to categorize these factors in terms of work processes inside and outside of professional kitchens. These insights of portioning control allow to conclusively reflect on much needed strategies for reducing food waste and preventing excessive caloric intakes.
{"title":"What is enough on a plate? Professionals’ practices of providing an “adequate portion” in the food service sector","authors":"Benjamin Hennchen","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1984610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1984610","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The current systems of food production and consumption are not sustainable due to a high level of resource inefficiency, environmental pollution and unhealthy eating habits. This paper focuses on the issues of wasting food and overeating, which have received increasing attention in other recent studies on the food service sector. A majority of those studies look at the choices made by customers regarding portion size and the effect those choices have on consumed food and leftovers. Against this background, the current exploratory study addresses the professionals’ perspective on why and how they serve specific food amounts to customers. To answer this question, the study draws on qualitative research and an analytical framework derived from theories of practice. The results show that defining and providing adequacy depends on professionals’ prior knowledge, the gastronomic concept, reflections on health and pricing issues, prevailing kitchen infrastructures, work rhythms, and esthetics in food presentation. An explanatory model is further developed in order to categorize these factors in terms of work processes inside and outside of professional kitchens. These insights of portioning control allow to conclusively reflect on much needed strategies for reducing food waste and preventing excessive caloric intakes.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43702758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-08DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1984558
Joana Catela
Abstract In 2020 and 2021, anthropologists confronted the obstacles of conducting fieldwork during the global COVID-19 pandemic. For months, we endured quarantine with others and grieved the loss what many consider the basis of our professional identity: participant observation. We were unable to predict how much our methodological toolkit would have to stretch and shrink to keep up with public health restrictions during a pandemic. We repeatedly asked ourselves: what, in fact, is ethnography and how can we do our work now? To address such a methodological predicament, this paper presents an ethnographic investigation conducted in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area during the summer of 2020 to show how several small-scale agricultural businesses managed to feed confined city dwellers during lockdown. Although concerns for these farmers’ dealings are practically absent from planning policies, they operate in the territory, changing the food system from within. This article also presents the pros and cons of investigating during a pandemic and the implications of reflexivity in the construction of ethnographic knowledge, even if our research needs to be done digitally and remotely for the time being.
{"title":"Reflection: “It opened our eyes”: ethnographic encounters during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lisbon, Portugal","authors":"Joana Catela","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1984558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1984558","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2020 and 2021, anthropologists confronted the obstacles of conducting fieldwork during the global COVID-19 pandemic. For months, we endured quarantine with others and grieved the loss what many consider the basis of our professional identity: participant observation. We were unable to predict how much our methodological toolkit would have to stretch and shrink to keep up with public health restrictions during a pandemic. We repeatedly asked ourselves: what, in fact, is ethnography and how can we do our work now? To address such a methodological predicament, this paper presents an ethnographic investigation conducted in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area during the summer of 2020 to show how several small-scale agricultural businesses managed to feed confined city dwellers during lockdown. Although concerns for these farmers’ dealings are practically absent from planning policies, they operate in the territory, changing the food system from within. This article also presents the pros and cons of investigating during a pandemic and the implications of reflexivity in the construction of ethnographic knowledge, even if our research needs to be done digitally and remotely for the time being.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41468770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-06DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1984523
Veronica Sau-wa Mak
Abstract At the turn of the 21st century, the demand for anti-aging functional milk among elderly Chinese people has become a major marketing success story in Hong Kong, even though most had never drunk milk prior to retiring and little scientific evidence supports the claims regarding the body-enhancing benefits derived from consuming specially formulated milk. This article examines the marketing and consumption of a technology-driven food—anti-aging formula milk—in Hong Kong, seeking to understand what draws the elderly to this functional food. Combining the theories of the pharmaceutical nexus, marketing semiotics, and emotion studies, the author investigates the pivotal roles of a network of actors—the scientists that endorse health claims, the government that normalizes milk consumption, and the global pharmaceuticals that generate fearful sensations regarding activity restrictions or immobility through marketing their formula milk products. Drawing on data from an analysis of in-depth interviews, health talks, and advertising materials, this article reveals the techniques by which anti-aging foods are promoted as the means for fashioning a physically fit self to maintain family and social networks, which are essential for the elderly to access emotional, social, and financial resources.
{"title":"Technologies and dietary change: the pharmaceutical nexus and the marketing of anti-aging functional food in a Chinese society","authors":"Veronica Sau-wa Mak","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1984523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1984523","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract At the turn of the 21st century, the demand for anti-aging functional milk among elderly Chinese people has become a major marketing success story in Hong Kong, even though most had never drunk milk prior to retiring and little scientific evidence supports the claims regarding the body-enhancing benefits derived from consuming specially formulated milk. This article examines the marketing and consumption of a technology-driven food—anti-aging formula milk—in Hong Kong, seeking to understand what draws the elderly to this functional food. Combining the theories of the pharmaceutical nexus, marketing semiotics, and emotion studies, the author investigates the pivotal roles of a network of actors—the scientists that endorse health claims, the government that normalizes milk consumption, and the global pharmaceuticals that generate fearful sensations regarding activity restrictions or immobility through marketing their formula milk products. Drawing on data from an analysis of in-depth interviews, health talks, and advertising materials, this article reveals the techniques by which anti-aging foods are promoted as the means for fashioning a physically fit self to maintain family and social networks, which are essential for the elderly to access emotional, social, and financial resources.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45635783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943612
Meike Brückner, Sandra Čajić, Christine Bauhardt
Abstract Pleasure and pressure are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the unpaid care economy. Food is the lens through which we examine the Janus-faced character of care during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on qualitative empirical findings, we argue that time is crucial to whether people experience ambivalence, joy or constraints in providing food for the self, the family and the wider community. In Berlin, Germany, the pandemic lockdown and closing of schools and childcare facilities led to an increase of time and energy spent on care work in the household. This care work has remained feminized. Women are at the forefront of organizing daily routines and inventing new strategies to manage time such as increased online shopping, intensified planning of errands, cooking and enjoying meals together, or becoming involved in local food networks. The altered temporal rhythms during the pandemic offer potential for the revaluation of care and for organizing care as a shared responsibility, however it remains questionable how this reorganization will evolve in the long run. For the future, the economic study of food must finally include caring practices in its valuation since they are the backbone of individual and societal well-being and demand considerable time, especially from women.
{"title":"Reflection: Food as pleasure or pressure? The care politics of the pandemic","authors":"Meike Brückner, Sandra Čajić, Christine Bauhardt","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943612","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Pleasure and pressure are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the unpaid care economy. Food is the lens through which we examine the Janus-faced character of care during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on qualitative empirical findings, we argue that time is crucial to whether people experience ambivalence, joy or constraints in providing food for the self, the family and the wider community. In Berlin, Germany, the pandemic lockdown and closing of schools and childcare facilities led to an increase of time and energy spent on care work in the household. This care work has remained feminized. Women are at the forefront of organizing daily routines and inventing new strategies to manage time such as increased online shopping, intensified planning of errands, cooking and enjoying meals together, or becoming involved in local food networks. The altered temporal rhythms during the pandemic offer potential for the revaluation of care and for organizing care as a shared responsibility, however it remains questionable how this reorganization will evolve in the long run. For the future, the economic study of food must finally include caring practices in its valuation since they are the backbone of individual and societal well-being and demand considerable time, especially from women.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943612","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45455957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943611
K. Alexander
Abstract In 2012 in a formerly abandoned meat market in Brussels, Belgium, an NGO was founded to produce social inclusion programs and transform an under-used urban space into a community hub. In attempting to fulfill its goal, the founders, staff, and volunteers have used surplus unsold market produce that would otherwise have been discarded in order to fuel several programs, by inviting people to take food or to come and share a meal. This article is an ethnographic study of those efforts that rely on food waste to promote community engagement, and considers them as alternative forms of “scrappy collaboration” and commensality. In probing “scrappy collaboration” as a framework for understanding food sharing in a modern European capital, the article investigates the use of food waste to produce social inclusion as well as to provide a means of both subsistence and resistance.
{"title":"Old abattoirs and new food politics: Sharing food and eating together at the meat market of Brussels","authors":"K. Alexander","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943611","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 2012 in a formerly abandoned meat market in Brussels, Belgium, an NGO was founded to produce social inclusion programs and transform an under-used urban space into a community hub. In attempting to fulfill its goal, the founders, staff, and volunteers have used surplus unsold market produce that would otherwise have been discarded in order to fuel several programs, by inviting people to take food or to come and share a meal. This article is an ethnographic study of those efforts that rely on food waste to promote community engagement, and considers them as alternative forms of “scrappy collaboration” and commensality. In probing “scrappy collaboration” as a framework for understanding food sharing in a modern European capital, the article investigates the use of food waste to produce social inclusion as well as to provide a means of both subsistence and resistance.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943611","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42954296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943616
Sabine Parrish
Abstract In this article, I examine the complications to funerary rituals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I consider the breakdowns of normal systems of community food provisions to bereaved families, while reflecting on both the creativity of populations to create new ritual activities and the lingering effects of being unable to complete expected rituals. Beginning with the death of my father in the early days of the pandemic, I go on to trace the ways in which food provisioning to the bereaved changed alongside developments in understandings of the virus. These changes are contrasted with my previous experiences of food as abundant in funerary situations, in order to draw out the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major disruption in how care for bereaved persons is expressed.
{"title":"Reflection: (Not) feeding the bereaved in the time of coronavirus","authors":"Sabine Parrish","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943616","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, I examine the complications to funerary rituals caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, I consider the breakdowns of normal systems of community food provisions to bereaved families, while reflecting on both the creativity of populations to create new ritual activities and the lingering effects of being unable to complete expected rituals. Beginning with the death of my father in the early days of the pandemic, I go on to trace the ways in which food provisioning to the bereaved changed alongside developments in understandings of the virus. These changes are contrasted with my previous experiences of food as abundant in funerary situations, in order to draw out the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major disruption in how care for bereaved persons is expressed.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943616","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47401808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943614
Deborah A. Harris, Rachel Phillips
Abstract In this article, we applied Wendy Griswold’s concepts of cultural objects and the cultural diamond to examine how a specific food—Southern style biscuits—underwent gourmetization. We provide evidence from observations of seven well-known gourmet biscuit restaurants, as well as a content analysis of their websites, Instagram accounts, and media coverage to understand how some establishments were able to position biscuits as a new gourmet food. We found that food producers combined upscale and exotic ingredients and recipes to create new ways of enjoying biscuits, as well as harnessed the power of social media to create excitement for their products. Simultaneously, the association of biscuits with the home and family recipes provided a form of cultural legitimacy and helped set these restaurants apart from fast food and its unhealthy, placeless reputation. Cultural tastemakers, including food writers and journalists, have aided in the rise of Modern Southern cuisine, which allows traditional Southern foods like biscuits to be viewed as higher in status. Customers, particularly those engaged in food-based tourism and those living in gentrifying areas have also helped encourage gourmetization through their willingness to pay higher prices and to embrace food as spectacle.
{"title":"What’s better than a biscuit?: Gourmetization and the transformation of a Southern food staple","authors":"Deborah A. Harris, Rachel Phillips","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943614","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, we applied Wendy Griswold’s concepts of cultural objects and the cultural diamond to examine how a specific food—Southern style biscuits—underwent gourmetization. We provide evidence from observations of seven well-known gourmet biscuit restaurants, as well as a content analysis of their websites, Instagram accounts, and media coverage to understand how some establishments were able to position biscuits as a new gourmet food. We found that food producers combined upscale and exotic ingredients and recipes to create new ways of enjoying biscuits, as well as harnessed the power of social media to create excitement for their products. Simultaneously, the association of biscuits with the home and family recipes provided a form of cultural legitimacy and helped set these restaurants apart from fast food and its unhealthy, placeless reputation. Cultural tastemakers, including food writers and journalists, have aided in the rise of Modern Southern cuisine, which allows traditional Southern foods like biscuits to be viewed as higher in status. Customers, particularly those engaged in food-based tourism and those living in gentrifying areas have also helped encourage gourmetization through their willingness to pay higher prices and to embrace food as spectacle.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943614","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48145600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943613
M. Bruegel
Abstract In February 2021, the French government relaxed the Labor Code and authorized workday lunches in the office and on the shop floor to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in dedicated eating places (canteens, lunch rooms, refectories). The general reception of the measure was indifferent. Conservative media, however, welcomed the news as a long overdue step toward more individual liberty and a less rigid labor market. This opinion misconstrues the historical origins of the lunch-time regulation as well as the economic effects and cultural meaning of lunch breaks. First, public health inspired the original regulation in 1894. Second, its upshots have since sustained workday commensality and people’s wellbeing. Third, scientific studies show that lunch breaks increase productivity in the afternoon. Far from being a drag on the general economy or the individual firm, midday commensality on working days benefits both employees and employers. Proper meals on workdays are likely to survive the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic.
{"title":"Covid-19, Workday Lunch and the French Labor Code","authors":"M. Bruegel","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943613","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In February 2021, the French government relaxed the Labor Code and authorized workday lunches in the office and on the shop floor to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in dedicated eating places (canteens, lunch rooms, refectories). The general reception of the measure was indifferent. Conservative media, however, welcomed the news as a long overdue step toward more individual liberty and a less rigid labor market. This opinion misconstrues the historical origins of the lunch-time regulation as well as the economic effects and cultural meaning of lunch breaks. First, public health inspired the original regulation in 1894. Second, its upshots have since sustained workday commensality and people’s wellbeing. Third, scientific studies show that lunch breaks increase productivity in the afternoon. Far from being a drag on the general economy or the individual firm, midday commensality on working days benefits both employees and employers. Proper meals on workdays are likely to survive the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943613","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41481114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-01DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1942425
Ashanté M. Reese
Over twenty years ago, Janet Poppendieck published Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. The book, one that is considered by many to be a foundational contribution to the study...
{"title":"Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America's Food Safety Net","authors":"Ashanté M. Reese","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1942425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1942425","url":null,"abstract":"Over twenty years ago, Janet Poppendieck published Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. The book, one that is considered by many to be a foundational contribution to the study...","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1942425","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47231120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-30DOI: 10.1080/07409710.2021.1943615
O. Morrow
Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.
{"title":"Ball jars, bacteria, and labor: CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise","authors":"O. Morrow","doi":"10.1080/07409710.2021.1943615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943615","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The production of nature has been employed to theorize shifts in nature-society relations that have accompanied historical transformations in production and social reproduction. While Marxist scholars have employed this framework to theorize the nature-society relations that accompany capitalist production, they have paid less attention to those that accompany non-capitalist production. In the meantime critical food studies has grown abundant with more-than-human and more-than-capitalist encounters with nature. This paper attempts to bring these two streams of thought together, in order to explore what they reveal about encounters and entanglements with microbes and non-human labor in the non-capitalist production of yogurt. Drawing on ethnographic research with a yogurt making cooperative in Somerville, Massachusetts, USA, I explore the contribution of microbial labor to the co-production of nature and post-human ethics in a cooperative food enterprise.","PeriodicalId":45423,"journal":{"name":"Food and Foodways","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07409710.2021.1943615","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49626670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}